Conservative party merger alters landscape in Alberta's oilpatch

Wildrose leader Brian Jean celebrates the yes vote during the Unity Vote at the Wildrose Special General Meeting in Red Deer Alta, on Saturday July 22, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson ORG XMIT: EDM108
JASON FRANSON,JASON FRANSON / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Alberta’s two main conservative parties have voted to unite, creating a political heavyweight in the heart of Canada’s oilpatch that is poised to unseat Premier Rachel Notley and push to kill the province’s carbon tax.

Members of the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties voted to ratify a merger agreement in results announced Saturday. The merger will create a United Conservative Party in the province by combining parties that hold 30 of 87 districts but received 52 percent of the vote in the last election, and are each outpacing Notley in recent polls.

“Today is not the end of Wildrose, but a new beginning where we are one step closer to putting power back into the hands of ordinary working people of Alberta,” Wildrose leader Brian Jean said after his party’s vote results were announced in Red Deer, Alberta. “We are together going to restore conservative principles to our great province.”

Some 95 percent of Wildrose members backed the merger, while it also won 95 percent support from the PCs, according to results announced Saturday.

“This is about a lot more than a merger of two political parties, this is about uniting Albertans of all backgrounds and all walks of life,” Progressive Conservative leader Jason Kenney said after his party’s results were released in Calgary. “The time is now to move forward, united.”

The unification spells trouble for the premier, whose New Democratic Party won a surprise majority in 2015 and benefited heavily from a split among right-leaning voters in one of Canada’s most conservative regions. The next election is due in 2019.

For the NDP, unification “is their worst-case scenario,” Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said in an interview. While an improving economy or a divide over socially conservative policies could still help her hold power, “a unified conservative party at this stage would be tough to beat.”

Disapproval Rating

Notley has one of the highest disapproval ratings among Canada’s provincial leaders and her NDP is trailing both the PCs and Wildrose, who will now merge, polling from Mainstreet Research shows. And yet the premier’s numbers remain relatively strong in each of the two major cities, where about two-thirds of electoral districts are clustered.

“It’s going to be a tough road for Rachel Notley and the NDP if the PCs and Wildrose unite — not impossible,” Mainstreet President Quito Maggi said in an interview. The merger could still spur further splintering, both among staunch conservatives and centrists. “It’s not a guarantee of that unified party forming government. They’re still going to have to do some work.”

While the merger agreement doesn’t specify a plan to repeal the carbon tax, its key figures have all campaigned against it. Notley’s carbon measures include a hard cap on emissions from Alberta’s oil sands, the world’s third-largest proven oil reserve, though the province isn’t near its self-imposed cap. Repeal of that will set up a collision course with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has imposed a minimum carbon price nationally as of 2018.

Environmental Campaigns

Alberta is Canada’s heaviest emitter, though only its fourth-most populous, and a frequent target of environmental and anti-oil campaigns.

“I’m not convinced that the carbon tax will disappear, and for evidence of that, all you have to do is look south of the border with repeal-and-replace of Obamacare,” Bratt said. “Once you bring in a program and it runs for a couple of years, it is tough to get rid of.”

The parties had also pledged to balance the budget and slash Alberta’s debt, which has ballooned as commodity prices slump. The province’s ratio of debt to nominal gross domestic product has doubled in the past two years, to 13.8 percent from 6.1 percent, though is still Canada’s smallest provincial debt as a share of the economy. The forecast deficit for 2017-18 is C$10.3 billion ($8.2 billion).

Canada’s wealthiest province is coping with a collapse in oil prices. Alberta draws 8 percent of its revenue from oil and other non-renewable resources, down from 18 percent just three years earlier, government budget documents show. It has the third-highest per capita program spending, according to RBC Economics, and the highest median household income among Canadian provinces.

The party will pick its leader on October 28, with an interim leader serving in the meantime.

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